The Questionable Wisdom of Crowds

Photo:   James Cridland

There's often far too much credibility given to the wisdom of crowds.


The original much-quoted observation by Francis Galton that the average of a group's estimates of something (beans in a jar, weight of a butchered ox) can be much better than an individual estimate may often be true, but in some circumstances it may be much worse. This is frequently forgotten.

I just came across an excellent ten minute presentation by Tom Scott which explains some of those other circumstances, providing a convincing live demonstration using audience tweets. It's worth having on hand for those occasions when you are tempted (or told) to simply average people's estimates of the likelihood of an event or of the impact of a disruption.

What's worth $4.9billion and fits in the back of your car?

Marauder: Picture Wikipedia

If your had to transport something worth $4.9 billion dollars, you would do so in a pretty awesome vehicle, wouldn't you? Perhaps you would use something like the Marauder, pictured above, to do the job.

You certainly wouldn't leave it in the back of a car, would you? But that's what happened recently to something worth $4.9 billion belonging to the the U.S. Department of Defense.

So what is worth $4.9 billion dollars and fits in the back of a car?

The answer is data. According to this report in the Army Times backup tapes containing personal medical and financial data on 4.9 million people being transported by an employee of Science Applications International Corp disappeared from the back of a car while in transit to a secure facility on September 13th. A class action lawsuit is claiming $1,000 on behalf of every person whose data was lost, as well as free credit monitoring for each of them for a year.

Is the data worth $4.9 billion: probably not. Is there a potential liability of $4.9 billion. Perhaps.

It's certainly something that should be considered when transporting or storing data. The question to ask is not just "how much is this data worth to us?" but "how much might this data cost us if it gets stolen?"

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(If you enjoy their sense of humor, you might enjoy this road test of a Marauder carried out by the UK BBC Top Gear team. Their road test includes a comparison with the Hummer, including the effects of a charge of 7lbs of plastic explosive placed beneath the vehicle.)

IOS5, Stanza, and Rescuing Your eBooks

Stanza was the best eBook reader on iPhones, iPod Touches, an iPads.

Until Apple released IOS5, which broke it.

Which would not matter too much, except that the company which produced Stanza, Lexcycle, was acquired by Amazon - maker of that well-known competing eBook reader, the Kindle. So Stanza development has stopped, and the likelihood of the app being fixed for IOS5 appears to be zero.

Unfortunately some of us had a lot of books we liked stored inside that Stanza application.

How do we get them back and into somewhere we can read them, such as iBooks?

(If you don't have eBooks tied up inside Stanza, skip the next bit...)

This Wired article pointed me at the right tool (Stanza Book Restore Tool ) to extract the books from unencrypted Apple iTunes backups.

However, it didn't work (java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot find backup folder) on my venerable copy of Windows XP.

This posting identified the nature of the problem - a bug in the Java code or the Java environment.

An 80Mbyte download from Oracle of the Java Development kit later, and I had a patched version. (If you need it, you can download my patched version here.)

Assuming you have java installed, the command line you need to run it is:

java -jar stanzabookrestore.jar

Make sure you specify an existing folder for the Book Output Folder. Don't use the default unless you want a desktop full of eBooks.

Once you have extracted the books, you can select the books in Windows Explorer and drag them into the Books section on iTunes. Sync with your iDevice, and you are back almost where you started before IOS5   - except that the interface on iBooks appears to be designed for people who don't own more than a dozen books.

That was Scary!

I hope the above directions are useful for other Stanza fans.

The risk lessons here appear to be:

• Don't just assume your software application is not obsolete and is still being maintained. Even it if is still available for download and the company's website exists, it may be obsolete. Nobody is going to write and tell you when it becomes obsolete!
• Beware of firmware and operating system upgrades - you never know what is going to break, and something always does.